Q:
What are the fundamental differences in the parlous state of the finances of Iceland and Ireland?
A:
One letter and about six months.
30 Jan 2009
29 Jan 2009
REALLY dirrrrrrrty gurrrls!!!
*** This email has been sent from the MEDIA ARTS AND DANCE email forum. To respond to all subscribers email MEDIA-ARTS-AND-DANCE@JISCMAIL.AC.UK. ***
Dear All
We are happy to announce that burlesque theatre practitioner and academic,
Gwendoline Lamour will be presenting the second keynote at this year's
postgraduate conference 'Journeys Across Media' (University of Reading). Her
paper will be on 'Romanticizing the Female Form'. More information on Ms
Lamour's performances can be found at: www.gwendolinelamour.com/
For more information on the conference (17 April 2009) feel free to visit
the University's website at:
http://www.reading.ac.uk/ftt/pg-research/ftt-pgrjam.asp
Kindest regards
Tim Vermeulen, Harper Ray and Reina-Marie Loader
"Miss Soapy T*t-Wa*k gets an Ology"
Far from "Romanticing the Female Form" - Burlesque always was and to the best of my knowledge in its 21st century Lap-Dancing incarnation, still is an amateur divertissement "entertainment" provided by whores for johns visiting knocking shops while they decided which sex slave to schtup.
I am not entirely sure which part of their "Form", 13 and 14 year old Victorian and latterly, often under-aged eastern European and Oriental prostitutes, will find quite so "Romantic" as they are being pawed by dishevelled and occasionally drunken eighteen stone men smelling of yesterday's kebab and week-old underwear.
Perhaps they will get to enlighten us when they attend the above brilliantly thought-through Conference. If they ask nicely enough, their pimps will probably be entirely happy to sponsor their attendance, in order to give us their view on the subject.
Maybe Gwendoline Tushylush and her silken ilk will bring us back their breathless and death-defying reports from the field?
Burlesque in its current form, is a dressing-up hobby, a lacy-veiled pretext for wobbly and untrained Trustafarian Fionas and Arabellas to stumble around in fans and fetish pumps, getting their tits and bits out for grinning City Boys in artfully designed retro-bordellos from Hoxton to Ladbroke Grove.
Let's face it, only these types and furtive c-list TV presentas can afford the entry and bar prices in these monumentally misguided forays into infantile degeneracy. Colour, movement, fur coats and no-knickers, - the perfect antidote for ex- junk-bond salesmen, week-end fetishists and the terminally spoilt wall-eyed children of Rock Stars and Advertising tycoons.
In isolation, what the spawn of Sodom and Gomorrah do of a night-time really could not matter less.
However, notwithstanding a terrifying lack of associative thinking, dignifiying Burlesque with publically funded academic legitimacy of any description, borders on the morally bankcrupt.
For Burlesque proudly to be presented as a pukka extension of Performance Art,pace Gogol Bordello, Shunt et al - whilst demonstrating no shortage of chutzpah, betrays the level of ingenuousness and lack of intellectual rigour usually accorded people who become musicians because they think there is money in it or those who enter politics in the belief they can change things.
There is something not quite nice about being invited to attend a scholarly dissertation on "Burlyscew" be it ever so post-modern and ironic, while thousands of women a day are continuing to be impregnated by HIV positive partners and millions more starve in Africa.
Perhaps it might be a fun and far more spontaneous alternative to just cut to the chase and actually get to live the Experience of Burlesque by running around the conference hall knocking over chairs, spilling vodka and chanting - Get Yer Charlies Out Darlin!
17 Jan 2009
Art - v-mammon - the debate rages
The prevalent evaluation and co-option of the arts as predominantly a series of commercial considerations is probably the single most debilitating influence on genuine creativity in the UK, actually throughout the world at the moment.
Certainly it cannot have failed to escape the notice of anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the history of art that wealth, patronage and the Fine-Arts-to-Order market have usually gone hand in hand. There's nothing like a Divine-Royal Charter
The fundamental difference was that the Medicis, the Borghias et al were still believers in, or at least occasionally intimidated by, a hazy notion of "God".
They supported artists with vision, years of training discipline, an ongoing drive to continually develop their talents and a sense of investment in the temporal to the greater glory of the spiritual, as a means by which they might help get their Patrons around Christ's severe admonishment concerning, rich men, eyes of needles, ease, camels and getting into heaven.
One could ask whether the faux-spiritual was a better motivation than the current predominantly dreadful Art the Super-rich now patronise as a hedge investment against the day their usual incomes from Girls, Guns, Drugs and dodgy Siberian resource pipelines dry up. Not much has changed since the Doge's day.
The question is whether patronage inspires great art, or whether great art, as an extension of the idea of the Divine, inspires the necessary patronage to support its creation?
In fact neither matters, as long as the common denominator is great art, rather than the ongoing and relentlessly overhyped High Value Fast Moving Consumer Goods which currently pass for meaningful and important in a Serotaesque sort of a way.
Charles Saatchi is an advertising man. His stock-in-trade is edgy, conceptual, tax-deductible throwaway storyboards and design resources for client pitch purposes. Much of what he now passes off as art has been hithertofore used in the flogging of oven-chips, mars bars, sanitary towels and the other useless consumptive detritus that his dreadful little business is engaged in forcing on us Droolers, Toilers and Couch-surfers of the world.
Using his high-priced help in marketing black-arts for perceptual infiltration and manipulation, artifically to inflate the inherent values of this mostly inconsequential conceptual "stuff" to the status of importance and value by giving it a name "Young British Art". By further sticking it on pedestals in galleries shows chutzpah and a remarkable gift for stealing the product of cess-pits and selling it back as soap.
Art's funding equations will never balance. Making good art is not easy. It can't be, by definition.
Perhaps, however, once we claw our way out of the looming depression, there will result in a far more positive Artistic legacy than we ever imagined. Less market and more ideas driven.
One in which only the committed and truly inspired will survive.
In the final analysis, and with a nod to Mr Darwin's bi-centennial, on the basis of natural selection this might be good for "the arts" of every genetic strain and disposition.
Certainly it cannot have failed to escape the notice of anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the history of art that wealth, patronage and the Fine-Arts-to-Order market have usually gone hand in hand. There's nothing like a Divine-Royal Charter
The fundamental difference was that the Medicis, the Borghias et al were still believers in, or at least occasionally intimidated by, a hazy notion of "God".
They supported artists with vision, years of training discipline, an ongoing drive to continually develop their talents and a sense of investment in the temporal to the greater glory of the spiritual, as a means by which they might help get their Patrons around Christ's severe admonishment concerning, rich men, eyes of needles, ease, camels and getting into heaven.
One could ask whether the faux-spiritual was a better motivation than the current predominantly dreadful Art the Super-rich now patronise as a hedge investment against the day their usual incomes from Girls, Guns, Drugs and dodgy Siberian resource pipelines dry up. Not much has changed since the Doge's day.
The question is whether patronage inspires great art, or whether great art, as an extension of the idea of the Divine, inspires the necessary patronage to support its creation?
In fact neither matters, as long as the common denominator is great art, rather than the ongoing and relentlessly overhyped High Value Fast Moving Consumer Goods which currently pass for meaningful and important in a Serotaesque sort of a way.
Charles Saatchi is an advertising man. His stock-in-trade is edgy, conceptual, tax-deductible throwaway storyboards and design resources for client pitch purposes. Much of what he now passes off as art has been hithertofore used in the flogging of oven-chips, mars bars, sanitary towels and the other useless consumptive detritus that his dreadful little business is engaged in forcing on us Droolers, Toilers and Couch-surfers of the world.
Using his high-priced help in marketing black-arts for perceptual infiltration and manipulation, artifically to inflate the inherent values of this mostly inconsequential conceptual "stuff" to the status of importance and value by giving it a name "Young British Art". By further sticking it on pedestals in galleries shows chutzpah and a remarkable gift for stealing the product of cess-pits and selling it back as soap.
Art's funding equations will never balance. Making good art is not easy. It can't be, by definition.
Perhaps, however, once we claw our way out of the looming depression, there will result in a far more positive Artistic legacy than we ever imagined. Less market and more ideas driven.
One in which only the committed and truly inspired will survive.
In the final analysis, and with a nod to Mr Darwin's bi-centennial, on the basis of natural selection this might be good for "the arts" of every genetic strain and disposition.
15 Jan 2009
PEE PEE DUCKIE, POO-POO daahhhling and the REALLY DIRRRRRTY GIRRRRLS- THE PEE-PEE, POO-POO CLUB GOES MAINSTREAM
http://www.duckie.co.uk/
Just wanted to draw the attention to the Arts Council England logo in the bottom right hand corner.
The Amateurs nite programme (FLIER as above) funded by this august organisation is marvellous darling, simply marvellous, but WAIT til you catch the real professionals' performances.
I think the highlight may be the woman who shoves a plastic funnel into her anus and gives herself an enema as the finale of her show, but no, come to think of it the stripping Person of Diminished Stature comes close, or maybe.....no I've got it!! The Trann, er Person of Indeterminate Gender, whose entire act consists of punching holes in a door with a hammer and then pissing onto the audience through the holes.
Brilliant, and we all thought the Arts were dying..........
Check out the video on their site (ADDRESS ABOVE) and admire the contemporary dance sections. Now that's what we call inclusivity.
There is a whisper that the Royal Ballet Company is thinking of lending a couple of artists for forthcoming shows since they and DUCKIE share quite a number of patrons within their audience constituency.
Rather than funding this farrago ( we have actually been to one of their Burlesque nights and got sprayed by someone whose act consisted of absorbing the contents of a washing up bowl of soapy water and blowing them over the audience from her vagina - and that one of the less hard-core acts) would it have not made more sense for the ACE to provide further, broader, performance opportunities for the flower of British contemporary dance in some kind of context relevant to the development of dance and dance audiences in the UK - rather than the moist gratification of a coterie of scatologically infantile degenerates clearly all suffering from chronically ineffective toilet training habits.
It would seem that choreographers are now being forced to throw their lot in with amateur nite at the Pee Pee, Poo-Poo Club in their desperation to get their work seen.
Unless we are all VERY careful, it is going to become increasingly difficult to distinguish between any of the creative output of UKplc.
20 Dec 2008
STRICTLY NOT DANCING
I am sorry to rain on the parade and frankly I suggest the more fanatical of you start erecting the heretics’ pyre preparatory to hurling me onto it, but please, somebody tell me, exactly what Strictly Come Dancing is actually for or about, except yet another opportunity to allow the Meejuhmachine to mess even more with our already completely addled minds?
As if the Soaps with their endless, mindless, breathless and over-wrought trivialities about the lives of drab nonentities at the bottom of the social food-chain were not enough brain damage.
Strictly Come Dancing is neither strict, nor comely nor strictly dancing. It is a bunch of c-list lumpen-TV totty shoe-horned into dresses which frankly would disgrace a Nevada knocking shop, hulking stiff legged sportsmen and the oddest assortment of sundry other “faces” most of whom would get passed over instantly in any sort of breeding or natural selection programme without a backward glance.
These incredibly inappropriately chosen oddities from the ruling cultural triumvirate of Television, Sport and Journalism, gallump inelegantly and for the most part unmusically around in front of four “ Judges” all of whom look to a person to be suffering from a lethal combination of terminal embarrassment and personal plumbing issues.
Allow the entire sorry mess to be presided, or should that be, lorded over by Bruce Forsyth who has raised the art of banality and mugging in the Wunnerful Whirl of Showbizzyness to an act of such pornographically buttock-clenching embarrassment, frozen in time somewhere between the death of Variety and Sammy Davis Jrs final hair weave, and lo! we have a televisual phenomenon!
Throw in some Sports Dance partners, yes I said it, Sports Dance, which is the bastard offspring of Hairdressing and the final thrashings of rabies, without the soul, the focus or the duende (look it up if you like) and you have a nightmare world caught somewhere between Saturday Night Fever and a bad hand-job in the toilets at Madam Jojos. All to an accompaniment of a mediahype of white noise pitch and astonishing ubiquity.
SCD - it even sounds like a terrifying public health menace - is the perfect opiate solution for the masses – actually the very one George Orwell promised would end-up being delivered to the drooling classes the moment the Advertising Industry (aka Big Brother's mouthpiece) cottoned onto TV as an unique opportunity for mass mind control.
The contestants are not dancers, their professional dance partners are twinkly toed hair-dos who specialise in the mind numbingly banal world of competitive ballroom dancing –they are NOT dancers either. They are exercise fanatics in sequins and make-up and that's just the men.
The whole farrago has as much to do with the rest of the vast, creatively complex and challenging world of “real” dancing and dance making as Margaret Thatcher has to do with Thug Kultcha.
The judges have to a person, never actually featured as dancers of any merit whatsoever themselves - honestly, try and find their dance CV's - not their Step-Maker CV's a WHOLE different thing to choreography or dancing for that matter – have somehow been empowered like some fantastical Star Chamber, to hurl at these hapless non-dancers a hair curlingly vitriolic mix of patronising professional jealousy, spite and breathlessly delivered poorly scripted judgemental criticism week after week.
The fact is when it started, it was just a chance for some hapless slebs with too much time on their hands (aka rapidly fading careers and aggressive agents) to dress up as the amateur denizens of Cat Houses or 50’s gigolos to fill a cheap Saturday night telly slot for some Car-crash TV Fun commissioning wonks.
It is interesting that when the redoubtable Mr Sergeant, the first of the grown-ups on this odd merry-go-round finally and very politely asked to get down from the mad-hatters tea-party on the grounds that the joke had worn too thin, the first people to saddle up and ride out with the media-lynch mob, were those judges who clearly had failed to understand that the first defence of the terminally untalented, who have been shot through the ceiling of their relative competencies, is to take themselves waaaay too seriously.
There is perhaps an ironic symmetry in this, in as much as it requires no more than the truly incompetent to judge the merely incompetent for the edification of the uninitiated.
All of this is preamble to the key point that Strictly Not Dancing has been and continues to be held up as the summit of achievement in the current “dance world”.
We now have a situation in which seriously weak, under-rehearsed and amateurishly underpowered performances of appalling bland and banal “choreography” is being passed off week after week as dancing that anyone should take seriously.
As far as hoping that this will encourage the next generation of genuinely interesting, committed and aesthetically challenging dance artists to buckle down and aspire to any idea of excellence, it is tantamount to the world’s great Renaissance artists trying to guide the next generation of painters by showing them the daubs of children and letting them throw paint around rather than the brilliant inspirational glories of the great ecclesiastical frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.
If we balanced any of this arrant pap with the occasional flash of the vast store of available and truly inspiring examples of genuine choreographic design going on throughout the dance world, by getting it anywhere near our television screens, ever, it would not be so bad.
The problem is that Strictly Come Dancing, we are ALL now reliably informed ever more hysterically, is as good as it gets. In the absence of any competition, this may very well become true simply through repetition.
It was once opined by a wit far greater than mine that if you have been doing “it” whatever “it” may be for two years got away with it, you can call yourself a professional. The time frame seems to have drastically shortened.
A society gets both the government and the culture it deserves, particularly when both are clearly ever more willing to sell their souls for good ratings.
As if the Soaps with their endless, mindless, breathless and over-wrought trivialities about the lives of drab nonentities at the bottom of the social food-chain were not enough brain damage.
Strictly Come Dancing is neither strict, nor comely nor strictly dancing. It is a bunch of c-list lumpen-TV totty shoe-horned into dresses which frankly would disgrace a Nevada knocking shop, hulking stiff legged sportsmen and the oddest assortment of sundry other “faces” most of whom would get passed over instantly in any sort of breeding or natural selection programme without a backward glance.
These incredibly inappropriately chosen oddities from the ruling cultural triumvirate of Television, Sport and Journalism, gallump inelegantly and for the most part unmusically around in front of four “ Judges” all of whom look to a person to be suffering from a lethal combination of terminal embarrassment and personal plumbing issues.
Allow the entire sorry mess to be presided, or should that be, lorded over by Bruce Forsyth who has raised the art of banality and mugging in the Wunnerful Whirl of Showbizzyness to an act of such pornographically buttock-clenching embarrassment, frozen in time somewhere between the death of Variety and Sammy Davis Jrs final hair weave, and lo! we have a televisual phenomenon!
Throw in some Sports Dance partners, yes I said it, Sports Dance, which is the bastard offspring of Hairdressing and the final thrashings of rabies, without the soul, the focus or the duende (look it up if you like) and you have a nightmare world caught somewhere between Saturday Night Fever and a bad hand-job in the toilets at Madam Jojos. All to an accompaniment of a mediahype of white noise pitch and astonishing ubiquity.
SCD - it even sounds like a terrifying public health menace - is the perfect opiate solution for the masses – actually the very one George Orwell promised would end-up being delivered to the drooling classes the moment the Advertising Industry (aka Big Brother's mouthpiece) cottoned onto TV as an unique opportunity for mass mind control.
The contestants are not dancers, their professional dance partners are twinkly toed hair-dos who specialise in the mind numbingly banal world of competitive ballroom dancing –they are NOT dancers either. They are exercise fanatics in sequins and make-up and that's just the men.
The whole farrago has as much to do with the rest of the vast, creatively complex and challenging world of “real” dancing and dance making as Margaret Thatcher has to do with Thug Kultcha.
The judges have to a person, never actually featured as dancers of any merit whatsoever themselves - honestly, try and find their dance CV's - not their Step-Maker CV's a WHOLE different thing to choreography or dancing for that matter – have somehow been empowered like some fantastical Star Chamber, to hurl at these hapless non-dancers a hair curlingly vitriolic mix of patronising professional jealousy, spite and breathlessly delivered poorly scripted judgemental criticism week after week.
The fact is when it started, it was just a chance for some hapless slebs with too much time on their hands (aka rapidly fading careers and aggressive agents) to dress up as the amateur denizens of Cat Houses or 50’s gigolos to fill a cheap Saturday night telly slot for some Car-crash TV Fun commissioning wonks.
It is interesting that when the redoubtable Mr Sergeant, the first of the grown-ups on this odd merry-go-round finally and very politely asked to get down from the mad-hatters tea-party on the grounds that the joke had worn too thin, the first people to saddle up and ride out with the media-lynch mob, were those judges who clearly had failed to understand that the first defence of the terminally untalented, who have been shot through the ceiling of their relative competencies, is to take themselves waaaay too seriously.
There is perhaps an ironic symmetry in this, in as much as it requires no more than the truly incompetent to judge the merely incompetent for the edification of the uninitiated.
All of this is preamble to the key point that Strictly Not Dancing has been and continues to be held up as the summit of achievement in the current “dance world”.
We now have a situation in which seriously weak, under-rehearsed and amateurishly underpowered performances of appalling bland and banal “choreography” is being passed off week after week as dancing that anyone should take seriously.
As far as hoping that this will encourage the next generation of genuinely interesting, committed and aesthetically challenging dance artists to buckle down and aspire to any idea of excellence, it is tantamount to the world’s great Renaissance artists trying to guide the next generation of painters by showing them the daubs of children and letting them throw paint around rather than the brilliant inspirational glories of the great ecclesiastical frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.
If we balanced any of this arrant pap with the occasional flash of the vast store of available and truly inspiring examples of genuine choreographic design going on throughout the dance world, by getting it anywhere near our television screens, ever, it would not be so bad.
The problem is that Strictly Come Dancing, we are ALL now reliably informed ever more hysterically, is as good as it gets. In the absence of any competition, this may very well become true simply through repetition.
It was once opined by a wit far greater than mine that if you have been doing “it” whatever “it” may be for two years got away with it, you can call yourself a professional. The time frame seems to have drastically shortened.
A society gets both the government and the culture it deserves, particularly when both are clearly ever more willing to sell their souls for good ratings.
5 Oct 2008
MORE ACADEMOBOLLOQUILISM - JOB SPEC
.....EXTRACT FROM A JOB SPECIFICATION FOR AN UNSPECIFIED MID-WESTERN USA ARTS FACULTY
ADVERTISING FOR YET ANOTHER TENURED INCONSEQUENTIALITY.
".......aimed at the individual level must pay attention to the professional as well as personal needs of faculty, and must consider both the stage of faculty members’ careers as well as the stage of their lives. This multi-prong, multilevel approach should be coordinated and integrated to assure that new initiatives on the same or across levels synergistically and strategically work together to further faculty development and retention. And in particular, faculty development strategies should be in alignment with the institution’s strategic goals and faculty tenure and promotion criteria so that individual career development simultaneously enhances the institution and rewards faculty.
Below five broad goals are listed that reflect and pertain to different levels of the institution, moving from the macro toward the micro level:
Goal 1. Create supportive institutional structures and policies
Goal 2. Revitalize the Center for Teaching
Goal 3. Develop a mentoring program
Goal 4. Enhance the quality of life for faculty on and off campus
Goal 5. Increase support for faculty scholarship.
All five goals are important and warrant the attention and resources of the institution. Several specific objectives have been identified for each goal.
At no point whatsoever, is there even the briefest description of what this chair is supposed to be teaching. I think the safe assunption is that it really doesn't matter, and actually no one cares.
More self-interested examples of the bland leading the blind..............
ADVERTISING FOR YET ANOTHER TENURED INCONSEQUENTIALITY.
".......aimed at the individual level must pay attention to the professional as well as personal needs of faculty, and must consider both the stage of faculty members’ careers as well as the stage of their lives. This multi-prong, multilevel approach should be coordinated and integrated to assure that new initiatives on the same or across levels synergistically and strategically work together to further faculty development and retention. And in particular, faculty development strategies should be in alignment with the institution’s strategic goals and faculty tenure and promotion criteria so that individual career development simultaneously enhances the institution and rewards faculty.
Below five broad goals are listed that reflect and pertain to different levels of the institution, moving from the macro toward the micro level:
Goal 1. Create supportive institutional structures and policies
Goal 2. Revitalize the Center for Teaching
Goal 3. Develop a mentoring program
Goal 4. Enhance the quality of life for faculty on and off campus
Goal 5. Increase support for faculty scholarship.
All five goals are important and warrant the attention and resources of the institution. Several specific objectives have been identified for each goal.
At no point whatsoever, is there even the briefest description of what this chair is supposed to be teaching. I think the safe assunption is that it really doesn't matter, and actually no one cares.
More self-interested examples of the bland leading the blind..............
REGARDING AUDIENCES - ON THE dysFUNCTIONS OF PUNDITRY
Interesting and quite instructive that issue seems to be taken with a supposed lack of a focus in different approaches to the critical language developing around Dancefilm.
The prime aim of discourse is merely to be effective in motivating open discussion, rather than engendering partisan debate. In a truly Socratic tradition, argument needs be seen just like any other creative standpoint or artistic manifestation and remain entirely neutral. An engagement of points of view rather than didactical position statements.
The particular set of ideas around which so much syndicated outrage seems to be engendered is that of actually identifying the languages in which it might be agreed, effectively to engage with audiences - an aim as important, as vital and as central to the development of presentational artistic practice as are the initial imperatives driving the creative impulse per se.
It is the very presence of an ongoing pressure to conform to a particular and current zeitgeist, or indeed the arrogance of those who presume that their view on what constitutes something as ineffable, moveable and unfixed as a "zeitgeist", which allows so much slippage of intention, meaning and qualitative rigour in the creative endeavours of the world.
A pundit, be they veritably and academically gold-braided more gaudily than a Marx Brothers general, can and will never be in any position whereby they might require another individual or group to regard any point of view as erroneous, any more authoritatively than they are empowered to order the sun to shine on a prescribed hour or day.
The abrogative assumptions which are now a permissable sine-que-non of pseudo-academic authoritarian behaviour, so prevalent among Pedagocracies, ourageously assumes an automatic right to give permissions, like so many papal dispensations, to abjure quality measurement of, with or by "their" students.
This ivy clad, ivory-towered, boiler-plated attitude, prevails towards a veritably pathological demotion of craft-skills to the status of petty bourgeois affectation, at best and entirely irrelevant at worst.
In so doing, it ensures the fertilisation, legitimisation and perpetuation of the feudalistic anachronisms of tenured vested interest on the one hand and the elevation of mediocrity on the other.
All of this, with an added cordon securite which protects them from ever having to properly square-up to the struggle, knock-backs and the bloodied tooth and claw of Darwinian survival, which the making of art in the real world, brings as its natural inheritance.
The creative world is as much one in which strength, fitness, talent and superiority should be as entirely independent of environmental concerns or personal predilection as it must be on the Olympic running track or the Bear-pit of the Commodities Exchanges.
It is absolutely incumbent upon the artist, primarily to strive for unattainable levels of executable excellence. Once approaching the necessary and inevitable humility which accompanies hard-won glimpses of genuine competence, the artist perhaps then might qualify for the approximation of "a voice". With this voice the next goal would be a tenuous grasp on that which might be worth saying in terms of relevance to anyone outside the otherwise inevitable cozy coterie of sisters, aunties, cousins, teachers and funding bodies.
The moment there exists any pontification on the role of the artist, be it in the finest, elegant and most resounding of prosidies, in the fine tradition of a finger trying to point at its own end, the inherently corrupt position of the pedagogue will inevitably be incapable of understanding that it must, by its very existence, be standing in its own light, and worse, the light of those around it.
It is at just such moments that the pundits weigh in with vaccuous, oelaginous and entirely inappropriate personality garlands, such as "seminal", "luminary" and the ubiquitous "influential".
Unless the views held be that of another artist in its own right and on equal terms, they can only ever be merely those of a critic, of whom John Updike so aptly opined, they are... "...as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea".
We need no more critics for criticism's sake. We need consensus on what constitutes quality and appropriateness of execution. We needs examine creative output in a common light-temperature of competency and fitness of purpose. Only having agreed the medium can one effectively begin to carve out the message.
The rest is babel.
At this point we have left, a sensible option.
We admit we are all merely consumers, well informed as we may be, and turn our available, useful time and attention to our fellow audience members.
The real challenge is in finding ways to apply necessary disciplines inherent in developing honest, coherent, respectful and preferably unmediated dialogue between audiences and the creative forces focused upon them by the artists who purportedly, are there to serve them.
If not the audience, then whom do they serve?
Surely not themselves and most assuredly not the egos of their teachers?
The prime aim of discourse is merely to be effective in motivating open discussion, rather than engendering partisan debate. In a truly Socratic tradition, argument needs be seen just like any other creative standpoint or artistic manifestation and remain entirely neutral. An engagement of points of view rather than didactical position statements.
The particular set of ideas around which so much syndicated outrage seems to be engendered is that of actually identifying the languages in which it might be agreed, effectively to engage with audiences - an aim as important, as vital and as central to the development of presentational artistic practice as are the initial imperatives driving the creative impulse per se.
It is the very presence of an ongoing pressure to conform to a particular and current zeitgeist, or indeed the arrogance of those who presume that their view on what constitutes something as ineffable, moveable and unfixed as a "zeitgeist", which allows so much slippage of intention, meaning and qualitative rigour in the creative endeavours of the world.
A pundit, be they veritably and academically gold-braided more gaudily than a Marx Brothers general, can and will never be in any position whereby they might require another individual or group to regard any point of view as erroneous, any more authoritatively than they are empowered to order the sun to shine on a prescribed hour or day.
The abrogative assumptions which are now a permissable sine-que-non of pseudo-academic authoritarian behaviour, so prevalent among Pedagocracies, ourageously assumes an automatic right to give permissions, like so many papal dispensations, to abjure quality measurement of, with or by "their" students.
This ivy clad, ivory-towered, boiler-plated attitude, prevails towards a veritably pathological demotion of craft-skills to the status of petty bourgeois affectation, at best and entirely irrelevant at worst.
In so doing, it ensures the fertilisation, legitimisation and perpetuation of the feudalistic anachronisms of tenured vested interest on the one hand and the elevation of mediocrity on the other.
All of this, with an added cordon securite which protects them from ever having to properly square-up to the struggle, knock-backs and the bloodied tooth and claw of Darwinian survival, which the making of art in the real world, brings as its natural inheritance.
The creative world is as much one in which strength, fitness, talent and superiority should be as entirely independent of environmental concerns or personal predilection as it must be on the Olympic running track or the Bear-pit of the Commodities Exchanges.
It is absolutely incumbent upon the artist, primarily to strive for unattainable levels of executable excellence. Once approaching the necessary and inevitable humility which accompanies hard-won glimpses of genuine competence, the artist perhaps then might qualify for the approximation of "a voice". With this voice the next goal would be a tenuous grasp on that which might be worth saying in terms of relevance to anyone outside the otherwise inevitable cozy coterie of sisters, aunties, cousins, teachers and funding bodies.
The moment there exists any pontification on the role of the artist, be it in the finest, elegant and most resounding of prosidies, in the fine tradition of a finger trying to point at its own end, the inherently corrupt position of the pedagogue will inevitably be incapable of understanding that it must, by its very existence, be standing in its own light, and worse, the light of those around it.
It is at just such moments that the pundits weigh in with vaccuous, oelaginous and entirely inappropriate personality garlands, such as "seminal", "luminary" and the ubiquitous "influential".
Unless the views held be that of another artist in its own right and on equal terms, they can only ever be merely those of a critic, of whom John Updike so aptly opined, they are... "...as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea".
We need no more critics for criticism's sake. We need consensus on what constitutes quality and appropriateness of execution. We needs examine creative output in a common light-temperature of competency and fitness of purpose. Only having agreed the medium can one effectively begin to carve out the message.
The rest is babel.
At this point we have left, a sensible option.
We admit we are all merely consumers, well informed as we may be, and turn our available, useful time and attention to our fellow audience members.
The real challenge is in finding ways to apply necessary disciplines inherent in developing honest, coherent, respectful and preferably unmediated dialogue between audiences and the creative forces focused upon them by the artists who purportedly, are there to serve them.
If not the audience, then whom do they serve?
Surely not themselves and most assuredly not the egos of their teachers?
1 Sept 2008
Hold on one hot minute there Boy! What? I SAY what....?
I think we need to explore this one a little more deeply.
At Dislocate06, Hamilton, Southern, and St. Amand will presentRunning Stitch a project which explores how a track made with a GPS device changes our awareness and experience of place through the new vantage points and perspectives afforded by the use of satellite navigation. Visitors to the exhibition are given a GPS-enabled mobile phone to track their journeys through the city centre. These walks result in individual GPS ‘drawings’ of the visitor’s movements that are then projected live in the exhibition to disclose hidden aspects of the city.
Each individual route is sewn, as it is taking place, into a hanging canvas to form an evolving tapestry that reveals a sense of place and interconnection. The walker, who is aware of the line they are producing and of the audience at a distance, also becomes a performer of their relationship to a local place. It is only through being live and participatory that the audience perceives the push and pull of the relationship between themselves, the stitcher who sews the route onto the canvas, and the viewer at a distance and sees the city emerge from the canvas.
At Dislocate06, Hamilton, Southern, and St. Amand will presentRunning Stitch a project which explores how a track made with a GPS device changes our awareness and experience of place through the new vantage points and perspectives afforded by the use of satellite navigation. Visitors to the exhibition are given a GPS-enabled mobile phone to track their journeys through the city centre. These walks result in individual GPS ‘drawings’ of the visitor’s movements that are then projected live in the exhibition to disclose hidden aspects of the city.
Each individual route is sewn, as it is taking place, into a hanging canvas to form an evolving tapestry that reveals a sense of place and interconnection. The walker, who is aware of the line they are producing and of the audience at a distance, also becomes a performer of their relationship to a local place. It is only through being live and participatory that the audience perceives the push and pull of the relationship between themselves, the stitcher who sews the route onto the canvas, and the viewer at a distance and sees the city emerge from the canvas.
26 Aug 2008
Thought for the day
.......only the educated are free.........
Epictetus
.....only the truly educated cease to be the slaves of their educators.............
after Epictetus
Epictetus
.....only the truly educated cease to be the slaves of their educators.............
after Epictetus
25 Aug 2008
Excerpts from Douglas Rosenberg's address at ADF Screendance 2008
(WITH COMMENTS AND OBSERVATIONS BY Dance and Film IN RESPONSE TO YET MORE INTERMINABLE NEOCOLLOQUIAL PSEUDO-ACADEMIC BOLLOQUIALISTIC SOLIPSISMS).
From Douglas Rosenberg's lecture: 'Curating The Practice'
There are multiple strands apparent in screendance production,
And, as is often the case, one can identify a pendulum swing away from the dominant paradigm of the moment toward another model. One reaction to the ubiquity of spectacle and virtuosity as well as the trends that currently dominate dominant festivals, takes form in work that is intimate, socially conscious, humble and thought provoking. This is work that at its core comes from a conceptual impulse and is antithetical to spectacle.
(WHY CANNOT IT BE BOTH - SAVE FOR THE INABILITY TO FIND THE NECESSARY TALENT OR APPLICATION SO TO BE?)
This body of work often trades the veneer of polished surfaces for the more difficult gestalt
(THOSE PESKY GERMANISMS, THEY DO CREEP IN, DON'T THEY...?)of content and form.
(ONE THING LESS INSTRUCTIVE THAN POLISHING A BRICK AND THAT’S TRYING TO FIND BRICK POLISH )
In doing so, it raises question important questions about the very form it inhabits. (ER………….YES?...........ANY MORE ON THIS………..NO?.....OK, MOVING ON….)
The programmed festival model is one in which we usually find the most recent screendance creations being shown and rarely do we see a body of work by a single artist created over time.
(POSSIBLY BECAUSE THE KIND OF DISPOSABLE ONE-OFF ART CREATED BY THE PARVENUE TENDS NOT TO LEND ITSELF TO AMASSING ANYTHING WHICH MIGHT BE DIGNIFIED WITH THE DESCRIPTION “BODY OF WORK”)
While the festival model currently dominates the exhibition of screendance, (OPEN A CINEMA DEDICATED TO ONLY SHOWING CONCEPTUAL SCREEN DANCE ON A DAILY PROGRAMMED BASIS AND I WILL SHOW YOU A WORLD-CLASS TUMBLEWEED FACTORY) I would note here that this was not always the case, at least here in the states. Seminal exhibitions of screendance work took place on both coasts. (BOY WERE THEY BIG THAT TUESDAY NIGHT, SEMINAL! SEMINAL!!! THEY STILL TALK ABOUT THESE EVENTS IN THE SAME HUSHED TONES AS “THE LAST NIGHT AT PHILMORE EAST AND “JUDY GARLAND AT CARNEGIE HALL”) One of the earliest media collectives, Video Free America in San Francisco both produced and curated work from the late 60’s through the eighties. The Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California screened curated programs, as did independent curators on both coasts in makeshift venues, underground cinemas and later in dance spaces such as The Dance Theater Workshop in New York.
Hans Breder, Professor of Art, created the Intermedia Area in the School of Art and Art
History at The University of Iowa in 1968, with which Elaine Summers was affiliated
and where she created some of her early dance film work. Summers was a member of the Judson Dance Theater in New York, the seminal group largely considered to be the founders of post-modern dance in the early 1960s. The group, which grew out of a dance composition class with Robert Dunn, included such luminaries
(THESE PEOPLE HAVE LIGHTED A STELLAR PATH FROM SOHO LOFT TO VILLAGE SALON, CREATING INCOMPREHENSION AND INTELLECTUAL INFERIORITY COMPLEXES AT EVERY CONTRACTON AND HIGH RELEASE. AT NO POINT IN THE LAST 40 YEARS HAS ANYONE OUTSIDE THE COGNOSCENTI SO MUCH AS HAD THEM PASS, EVEN MOMENTARILY, ACROSS THEIR CREATIVE RADAR SCREENS. WHILE DOUBTLESS BEING PEERLESS, COMMITTED AND TALENTED,SURELY "LUMINARY" IS KINDA PUSHING THE ENVELOPE OF CREDIBILITY FOR ALL BUT THE TINIEST OF TIPPY-TOED COZY COTERIES)
as Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, and David Gordon. The Judson group questioned the very nature of dance and its practice,
(PLEASE SEND ME A COPY OF "THE LIST OF QUESTIONS ON THE NATURE OF DANCE" UNDER PLAIN COVER BY RETURN OF POST)
opening the door to a new set of possibilities,
(HOW, NEW, NO DANCE ON FILM UNTIL THEN, OH I SEEEE, NOT REAL DANCE – ONLY THE FAKE CLASSICAL, MARTHA GRAHAM, AGNES DE MILLE, FOKINE, PETIPA, FOSSE, ASTAIRE, KELLY KIND OF STUFF EH?)
including dance on film and video, and dance in a mediated environment. Summers worked extensively with projected film and images in a dance environment,
(COME AGAIN, MEDIATED ENVIR...)
beginning as early as the first Judson concert in 1962. She also made freestanding dance films.
(AS OPPOSED TO THE SORT THAT NEEDED SUPPORT STRUCTURES?)
She founded the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York as well as her own dance/intermedia company, the Elaine Summers Dance and Film Company, which toured experimental multi-media works from the 1970s forward. Summers’s work in multi-media, from its earliest stages, made dance an element in a kind of gesamkunstwerk
(ENOUGH ALREADY ...WITH THE ERSATZ GERMANERUDITIONISINGWERKENWORDEN)
of imagery that became a model for generations of other artists whose work involved synthesizing dancing bodies into an electronic field of activity.
( ACHTUNG...HANDE HOCHE TOMMY ENGLANDER SWINE - VE HAF ZE ZERIOUS KOMISCHLUSTIGERSATZENWERDEN COMINGZE UPPEN INDER NEXTE FEW ZENTENCENGERSTRUMPFEN....
Her films, including In the Absence and the Presence, (AKA – ALL OVER THE SHOP), Iowa Blizzard,(A CRITICAL SUCCES D’ESTIME) and Two Girls Downtown Iowa, 1973,(. “…BEG, BORROW, STEAL A TICKET FOR THIS ONE…” ROLLING STONE )deconstruct dance and re-present it as often formalist, abstract imagery that suggests, but does not demonstrate, dance. Summers’s use of movement in those seminal films was often excruciatingly slow and asked the viewer to forego expectations of more traditional elements of “choreography” in favor of a gestalt
(ICH WARNE DICH!!…….)
of cinematic motion. The resonance of her approach is evident in many subsequent dance films, and even more so in the very idea of intermedia or multi-media dance activity through the present. Yvonne Rainer is often cited as a seminal
(MORE OF THIS SEMEN, GET A GRIP YOU CONCEPTUALIST ONANISTS YOU…ON 2ND THOUGHTS, PERHAPS DON’T GRIP SO TIGHT……)
figure in screendance, which she clearly is.
(CLEARLY? I THOUGHT SHE ABSOLUTELY MAINTAINED THE NO TO PERSONALITY, NO TO...OH HANG ON, THE SHOOTING IN THE FOOT THING FOLLOWS...))
However, it is in her famous manifesto that she articulates a position regarding a theory of dance that is overlooked for its significance to the screendance debate. In Yvonne Rainer’s NO Manifesto of 1965, the choreographer/filmmaker states:
No to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make believe no to glamour and transcendency of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved.
(….ER….WHICH BIT ARE WE ACTUALLY ALLOWED TO DO……?)
Amy Greenfield reifies
(HMM, I HAVE A WEE PROBLEM IN "REIFYING" THAT WHICH IS MILITANTLY AND SO PALPABLY ANTI OBJECTIFICATION. CAN WE DISCUSS THIS AS A SEPARATE PHD STRAND?)
Yvonne Ranier’s manifesto in films such as Encounter (l970), For God While Sleeping (l970), Transport [1971], Dirt (l97l), and Element (l973). For Greenfield, technical dancing is irrelevant,
(OF COURSE IT IS, PARTICULARLY IF YOU CAN’T DO IT)
rather, the mise-en-scène of bodies in real, physical – as well as traumatic and repetitive – motion lies at the core of her cinematic exploration. In Transport, for instance, we see a group of people, not performers or dancers, but individuals who can only be immediately identified as humans engaged in a very visceral set of tasks, undertaken with deeply-felt conviction. In other words, there is no artifice and little evidence of the camera’s alteration of reality
(CRUSHING DULLNESS IS THE ONLY GUARANTOR OF A DIRECT AND APT DEPICTION OF REALITY. BUT WAIT...WHAT DO WE MAKE OF DOGME?)
as we see the group carrying a member aloft over rugged terrain, until exhaustion sets in and then another member is lifted above their heads and the process repeats.
( AT LAST! THE PERFECT INSOMNIA CURE!)
As in Ranier’s manifesto, there is no cinematic magic in these early films, no glamour and certainly no transformation. It is what it is and nothing else.
(INTRINSICALLY ANTI-ART, ANTI-EXPERTISE, ANTI INTERESTING)
Neither the movers nor the film are virtuosic.
(THAT IS PATENTLY APPARENT TO EVEN THE LEAST EXPERT OF VOYEUR)
The film is, rather, a moment in time, (WHEN IS IT NOT?) an intervention of camera and recording device into a mindful but seemingly meaningless version of what Allan Kaprow might call “child’s play.”
(MISSED IT! THE ONE TIME A GERMANISM SUCH AS KINDERSPIEL MIGHT EVEN HAVE BEEN HALFWAY APPROPRIATE...)
This work breaks down expectations of both performance and the art of filmmaking.
(IF ALL ELSE FAILS, BREAKDOWN EXPECTATIONS AND WHATEVER YOU DO, LOWER STANDARDS)
In Greenfield’s early work, nothing and everything happens simultaneously.
(NOW THAT QUITE A TRICK, ONLY ACHIEVED SO FAR BY THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT, THE EX- UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS….REMEMBER THOSE GUYS….? AND IT WOULD SEEM MS GREENFIELD)
Her work is a connective thread from dance to what would later become known
(BY WHOM EXACTLY)
as performance art;
( I REPEAT, BY WHOM?)
it also connects to conceptual and minimal art
(ONE MUST DEFY ANY PUNDIT NO MATTER HOW ELOQUENT OR VERBOSE THE RIGHT TO DEFINE ANYTHING AS NEBULOUS, FREE-RANGE OR INHERENTLY ELASTIC IN DEFINITION AS CONCEPTUAL ART. ALL ART IS CONCEPTUAL BY DEFINITION.NO CONCEPT, NO ART, NO DEFINITION) Greenfield’s films are a flashpoint for hybridity
(WHOA THERE TIGER – FLASHPOINT – HYBRIDITY….?)
within the context of an evolving esthetic of screendance in a time of great change in the art world in general
(WHEN EXACTLY WAS THE ART WORLD NOT IN A TIME OF GREAT CHANGE, OR DO WE MEAN MERELY THE LATEST PAROXYSM OF ISM..ER..ISMS….ER……..) .
They are not dance, nor can one argue successfully that they are not not dance.
(SO NOT DANCE AND NOW NOT NOT DANCE ALREADY? PERHAPS THEY ARE NOT NOT STOP GO STOP NOT DANCE – THERE NOW - THAT SHOULD DO THE TRICK….)
They are exhortations to reconsider the nature of dance, community, and cinema. (EXHORTING WHOM EXACTLY EXCEPT FOR A TINY COTERIE OF SIMILARLY MINDED N.E.A. FUNDED LEGENDS IN A GREENWICH VILLAGE SUNDAY LUNCHTIME)
In 1983, Amy Greenfield and Elaine Summers curated and produced the important Filmdance Festival
( IMPORTANTLY PRODUCED ACRES OF MATERIAL FOR THE DENIZENS OF IVY-CLAD BOON-DOCK UNIVERSITIES TO PONTIFICATE WINDILY WITH THEIR DIGI-DANCE GURUS FOR YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS – HELL WE EVEN FUND A UNIVERSITY TENURE CHAIR IN THIS IMPORTANT FESTIVAL ALONE – IT’S THE CULTURE SEE?)
which took place over two weeks at the Public Theater in New York, with more than one hundred films and filmed sequences scheduled in twenty-one different programs. .
(I SMELL AT LEAST THREE PHD’S FOCUSED EXCLUSIVELY ON THIS LITTLE GET-TOGETHER ALONE) They also produced a slim black catalog,
(CERTAINLY A TAD SLIMMER THAN THE MASSIVE EGOS WHICH MUST HAVE PONTIFICATED ENDLESSLY INTO THE NIGHTS TO PRODUCE IT….) which contains essays by both filmmakers and choreographers and is a highly prized document among students and scholars of the genre (OH THOSE PESKY STUDENTS AND SCHOLARS, SO MOVING, SO SHAKING - NEVER IN THE HISTORY OF THE PHD IN PHOTOCOPYING TECHNIQUES - HAS SO MUCH OF SO LITTLE CONSEQUENCE, BEEN REHASHED AND REHEATED, BY SO MANY…)
Both Summers and Greenfield as well as James Byrne who curated the 1989 series at Dance Theater Workshop were artists first, though artists that were interdisciplinary and often worked outside of the discipline of dance. Byrne’s notes for “Eyes Wide Open” at DTW state,
“Featured in this program are dance films and videos that demonstrate bracingly innovative approached to constructing cinematic choreography (AS DISTINCT FROM CHOREOGRAPHIC CINEMATOGRAPHY AND OF COURSE THE VERY LATEST IN GRAPHICHALISED CINEMINIMILISTOGRPAHY) from disparate and minimal movement sources. (SAY WHAT BOY?) All of these works strive to create new forms and structures for the presentation of a screen reality dealing with the human figure and movement. None of the films deal with a traditional approach to filming dance…(OH HEY, EVERYONE, LETS MAKE A DANCE FILM BUT NOT USE A CAMERA!!OR ER DANCERS, OR ANY IDEAS – YEAH, COOOOOLLLL!) This fascinating selection of new works presents a range of possibilities that push and expand the edges of dance video.”
(FORTUNATELY THOUGH, TAKING UP VERY LITTLE ROOM IN THE MIDDLE, SUCH A BADLY OVERLOOKED AREA WHEN THE PUSHING AND ENVELOPES AND ER, EXPANDING GETS SERIOUSLY UNDERWAY AND THE GARDE BEGINS TO GET REALLY DOWN AND ER … AVANT)
This curator’s statement puts his agenda out front of the work and creates a context for viewing. It makes evident that the selection of work both troubles and questions the nature of the form.(THERE’S TROUBLE…RIGHT HERE IN THE NATURE OF THE FORM…) It also operates as a kind of challenge to both makers and curators to answer by way of further exhibitions. (ONE ANSWERS QUESTIONS. ONE FACES CHALLENGES, …I THINK…)
In the catalog for Filmdance 1890’s-1983 Amy Greenfield notes:
“This catalog sets out to discuss the nature of filmdance. Each writer in the catalog was free to choose his or her own subject. No writer knew the specific viewpoints of the others. Therefore, the articles present varying, sometimes opposing, definitions, theories, and discussions on the nature of Filmdance…( CONTROVERSY IS THE SINGLE WORD WHICH SHOULD MORE OR LESS COVER THE ABOVE WAFFLE). The artists who responded to the invitation to write have made statements either on their own films or on their theories of filmdance. In setting down their thoughts, they further help to articulate the varying and changing nature of filmdance. (CHANGING AND VARYING IN THE INTENSITY OF THE OBSCURITY AND INACCESSIBILITY OR MERELY IN THE LEVEL OF THE MILITANT PATRONISING OF AN INCREASINGLY BEFUDDLED AUDIENCE BASE?)
James Byrne and Amy Greenfield each make their case for curatorial prerogative, but both point to the larger needs and desires of the field in general in their statements. The curator’s statements articulate a methodology for how the work might circulate conceptually, as a whole made up of individual voices. Likewise, the festival model creates a context for viewing and also sets parameters for discourse. However, the festival model, often lacking a thesis and leaning more toward an entertainment model is less clear in regard to a desired outcome. So, the gap between those two approaches has led me to a series of rhetorical questions around which this conference is built:
• What responsibilities do programmers and directors of screendance festivals have in regard to defining the field?(FIND SOME FILMS WORTH FORCING PEOPLE OUT OF THEIR HOMES TO COME AND SEE)
• Can curating function as a kind of critical thinking?(IS THERE ANY OTHER KIND OF THINKING IN RELATION TO CURATORIAL PRACTICE?)
• What part might curators play in creating intelligent and thoughtful programming that articulates a distinct point of view that sets one festival apart from another?
(THEY HAD BETTER START AND SOON. AT THE MOMENT THERE IS VERY LITTLE TO DISTINGUISH ANY ONE OF THESE DESPERATE EXERCISES IN WASTING ARTS SUBSIDY FROM ANY OTHER AND FRANKLY A PERILOUSLY DIMINISHING DEMOGRAPHIC ACTUALLY CARE.)
• What does it mean to curate a program of dances for the screen?
(OH BOY! NOW HERE'S A SERIOUS STROKEY BEARDY MOMENT.)
• What historical precedents are there to be found in fine art or experimental cinema models? (WELL LET’S DO THE FINE ART ONE FIRST – RECKON GAINSBOROUGH WAS A MAJOR INFLUENCE ON CONCEPTO-POST MODERN UN-CHOREOGRAPHIC PLASMA OUTCOME SCREEN WORK, BUT HE TRIED TO PLAY DOWN THIS INFLUENCE IN FAVOUR OF HIS POSH-PEOPLES’ PORTRAIT WORK, AND OF COURSE THERE ARE THE FAMOUS DA VINCI STORYBOARDS FOR DEAD DREAMS OF MONOCHROME MEN HOWEVER LLOYD NEWSON FOUND THEM A LITTLE TRITE AND UNDERPOWERED FOR HIS VISION OF THE PIECE.)
• How might curating function as historical documentation? (NOTE TO SELF, WHEN CURATING, KEEP A DIARY – HISTORY OF WHAT, PRAY?)
• Curating as writing: does an articulately curated program function as a text for understanding the form? (NAH! JUST SHOW THE MOVIES, ITS NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION. CREATIVE WRITING CLASS NEXT DOOR LOVE, AND ASK THEM TO KEEP IT DOWN IN THERE, WE ARE TRYING TO SHOW SOME FILMS IN HERE!)
• How might curating shape a dialog about entertainment and the relationship of media to dance?(DIALOGUE KIND OF PRESUPPOSES THE EXISTENCE OF INTERLOCUTORS. UM…..ER…AM I THE FIRST HERE?....SHOULD I GO AND HAVE A COFFEE DOWNSTAIRS UNTIL THE OTHERS GET HERE…..?...ER HELLO …)
• What might curated programs allow for that programs chosen by other means might not? (WELL IT’S A LOT LESS MESSY THAN GETTING YOUR MATES ROUND TO READ CHICKEN ENTRAILS, IF THAT’S WHAT YOU MEAN.)
• Can curating define a model for criticality? (THINK I NEED A BREATHER AT THIS POINT WHICH MIGHT BE A GOOD MOMENT TO QUESTION THE ACTUAL WORD “CRITICALITY”.
UNLESS I AM MUCH MISTAKEN CRITICALITY DESCRIBES THE BEHAVIOURS OF SUB-ATOMIC PARTICLES WHEN IN THE PRESENCE OF FISSILE MATERIAL – DANCEFILM, MOVING IMAGE, CONCEPTUALISM, PARTICLE PHYSICS?...... OOOOHHHH! I SEE THE CONNECTIONS NOW. MORE IMPORTANTLY, I BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND WHY SO MANY DANCEFILM AUDIENCES BEGIN TO LOOK AND FEEL AS ALIENATED AS THE JEWS OF LINZ DURING THE EARLY HOURS OF KRISTALLNACHT IN MANY OF THE AUDITORIA I SHARE WITH THEM.)
• What kind of topics might be suggested as curated programs and what might those topical programs address? (DEAR DOCTOR OF MEEJUH STUDIES AND THAT AND EVERYTHING AND EVERYTHING. YOU ARE SO CLEVER AND ME LITTLE CURATOR HAVE NO IDEA WHAT'S WRONG WITH MY CREATIVE CHOICES. CAN YOU HELP ME DOCTOR…PLEASE?)
• How might curating help to enunciate genres in the field?(CAREFULLY NOW CHILDREN, ROUND MOUTHS AND E..N..U..N..C..I..A..T..E.. G.E.N.R.E.S…YES THAT’S GOOD, AGAIN…. GENRES, NOW LETS GO INDOORS AND TRY THIS AGAIN…..)
With curating or any sort of selection process in which some are chosen, others not, comes the question of elitism.
In other words, who gets to choose and why?
(I DO!!!! I, THE CURATOR!!! NO QUESTION. I AM THAT ELITE OF ONE. WHY? BECAUSE I GET MYSELF UP EARLY AND GO TO BED VERY LATE EVERY DAY, AND IN BETWEEN, PLOUGH THROUGH HOURS AND HOURS OF EARNEST, WELL MEANT, IF UNUTTERABLE DULLNESS, JUST TO WINKLE OUT THE OCCASIONAL FIVE MINUTES OF WELL MADE FILM IN ANY G.E.N.R.E.)
Curating is not however, simply about choosing. (BLIND, AHHHH I’M BLINDED BY THE LIGHT GIVEN OFF BY THIS PARTICULAR INSIGHT, AAHHH – YOU BET IT AINT!
MAYBE WE SHOULD MENTION IN THE PROCESS THE VENUE HIRE, THE LICENSES, THE RECALCITRANT AND GREEDY DISTRIBUTORS, THE MARKETING, THE TICKET OFFICE, THE LATE DELIVERY OF FLYERS AND THIRTY FIVE TYPOS IN THE THE BROCHURE PROOFS, ALL THE WHILE WATCHING EVERY POST FOR THE CHEQUE FROM YOUR MAIN SPONSOR WHO IS BUSILY GOING BUST JUST BEFORE THEY DESPATCH THE CASH…ETC, ETC, ETC....?)
It is a pro-active practice which by its very nature contains in equal parts, academic/pedantic/scholarly and teaching components.( WHATEVER IT IS IS IS NOT THE PEDANTIC BLAH OF PEDAGOGOPUNDITS, DREAMING OF INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL, AND THE UNDIVIDED ATTENTION OF TINY, SLEEPY AUDIENCES OF THE TERMINALLY UNDISTINGUISHED TUCKED AWAY IN DUTCH ARTS CENTRES.
YEEEEEHAAAAH, EUROPE AT LAST!!!!.AND ON AN N.E.A. GRANT NO LESS!!!)
There is in fact a high degree of responsibility that one undertakes as a curator,(YOU DON'T SAY!!) not only to the work, but also to the culture of the art form in general, its historical provenance, its way forward and its venous flow of inter-related tributaries often located outside of its own discipline.
(HIGH RESPONSIBILITY……. VENOUS……..TRIBUTARY…….. OUTSIDE OF ITS OWN DISCIPLINE.
IS THIS A BADLY BUILT SOVIET ERA DAM PROJECT OR A FEW DVD’S MADE BY SOME CONTEMPORARY DANCE STUDENTS WITH ILL-DEFINED AND UNUSUALLY MALEVOLENT DYSFUNCTIONAL ATTITUDES TO THEIR FATHERS WE HAVE HERE? FROM WHICH A BENIGHTED CURATORIAL SOUL IS ATTEMPTING TO WREST SOME SEMBLANCE OF A PATTERN, THEME OR PROGRAMMATIC INTEGRITY ONTO WHICH THEY MIGHT HANG THEIR WELL-INTENTIONED AND DESPERATELY UNDERSUPPORTED EVENT?
(ONE COULD GO ON, BUT ...........WHY?)
etc,etc,etc,etc,etc,etc
To represent fully this windy and occasionally tautological tract in a full version of the Rosenberg paper go here:
http://www.videodance.org.uk/pages/curating_the_practice_edited.doc
From Douglas Rosenberg's lecture: 'Curating The Practice'
There are multiple strands apparent in screendance production,
And, as is often the case, one can identify a pendulum swing away from the dominant paradigm of the moment toward another model. One reaction to the ubiquity of spectacle and virtuosity as well as the trends that currently dominate dominant festivals, takes form in work that is intimate, socially conscious, humble and thought provoking. This is work that at its core comes from a conceptual impulse and is antithetical to spectacle.
(WHY CANNOT IT BE BOTH - SAVE FOR THE INABILITY TO FIND THE NECESSARY TALENT OR APPLICATION SO TO BE?)
This body of work often trades the veneer of polished surfaces for the more difficult gestalt
(THOSE PESKY GERMANISMS, THEY DO CREEP IN, DON'T THEY...?)of content and form.
(ONE THING LESS INSTRUCTIVE THAN POLISHING A BRICK AND THAT’S TRYING TO FIND BRICK POLISH )
In doing so, it raises question important questions about the very form it inhabits. (ER………….YES?...........ANY MORE ON THIS………..NO?.....OK, MOVING ON….)
The programmed festival model is one in which we usually find the most recent screendance creations being shown and rarely do we see a body of work by a single artist created over time.
(POSSIBLY BECAUSE THE KIND OF DISPOSABLE ONE-OFF ART CREATED BY THE PARVENUE TENDS NOT TO LEND ITSELF TO AMASSING ANYTHING WHICH MIGHT BE DIGNIFIED WITH THE DESCRIPTION “BODY OF WORK”)
While the festival model currently dominates the exhibition of screendance, (OPEN A CINEMA DEDICATED TO ONLY SHOWING CONCEPTUAL SCREEN DANCE ON A DAILY PROGRAMMED BASIS AND I WILL SHOW YOU A WORLD-CLASS TUMBLEWEED FACTORY) I would note here that this was not always the case, at least here in the states. Seminal exhibitions of screendance work took place on both coasts. (BOY WERE THEY BIG THAT TUESDAY NIGHT, SEMINAL! SEMINAL!!! THEY STILL TALK ABOUT THESE EVENTS IN THE SAME HUSHED TONES AS “THE LAST NIGHT AT PHILMORE EAST AND “JUDY GARLAND AT CARNEGIE HALL”) One of the earliest media collectives, Video Free America in San Francisco both produced and curated work from the late 60’s through the eighties. The Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California screened curated programs, as did independent curators on both coasts in makeshift venues, underground cinemas and later in dance spaces such as The Dance Theater Workshop in New York.
Hans Breder, Professor of Art, created the Intermedia Area in the School of Art and Art
History at The University of Iowa in 1968, with which Elaine Summers was affiliated
and where she created some of her early dance film work. Summers was a member of the Judson Dance Theater in New York, the seminal group largely considered to be the founders of post-modern dance in the early 1960s. The group, which grew out of a dance composition class with Robert Dunn, included such luminaries
(THESE PEOPLE HAVE LIGHTED A STELLAR PATH FROM SOHO LOFT TO VILLAGE SALON, CREATING INCOMPREHENSION AND INTELLECTUAL INFERIORITY COMPLEXES AT EVERY CONTRACTON AND HIGH RELEASE. AT NO POINT IN THE LAST 40 YEARS HAS ANYONE OUTSIDE THE COGNOSCENTI SO MUCH AS HAD THEM PASS, EVEN MOMENTARILY, ACROSS THEIR CREATIVE RADAR SCREENS. WHILE DOUBTLESS BEING PEERLESS, COMMITTED AND TALENTED,SURELY "LUMINARY" IS KINDA PUSHING THE ENVELOPE OF CREDIBILITY FOR ALL BUT THE TINIEST OF TIPPY-TOED COZY COTERIES)
as Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, and David Gordon. The Judson group questioned the very nature of dance and its practice,
(PLEASE SEND ME A COPY OF "THE LIST OF QUESTIONS ON THE NATURE OF DANCE" UNDER PLAIN COVER BY RETURN OF POST)
opening the door to a new set of possibilities,
(HOW, NEW, NO DANCE ON FILM UNTIL THEN, OH I SEEEE, NOT REAL DANCE – ONLY THE FAKE CLASSICAL, MARTHA GRAHAM, AGNES DE MILLE, FOKINE, PETIPA, FOSSE, ASTAIRE, KELLY KIND OF STUFF EH?)
including dance on film and video, and dance in a mediated environment. Summers worked extensively with projected film and images in a dance environment,
(COME AGAIN, MEDIATED ENVIR...)
beginning as early as the first Judson concert in 1962. She also made freestanding dance films.
(AS OPPOSED TO THE SORT THAT NEEDED SUPPORT STRUCTURES?)
She founded the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York as well as her own dance/intermedia company, the Elaine Summers Dance and Film Company, which toured experimental multi-media works from the 1970s forward. Summers’s work in multi-media, from its earliest stages, made dance an element in a kind of gesamkunstwerk
(ENOUGH ALREADY ...WITH THE ERSATZ GERMANERUDITIONISINGWERKENWORDEN)
of imagery that became a model for generations of other artists whose work involved synthesizing dancing bodies into an electronic field of activity.
( ACHTUNG...HANDE HOCHE TOMMY ENGLANDER SWINE - VE HAF ZE ZERIOUS KOMISCHLUSTIGERSATZENWERDEN COMINGZE UPPEN INDER NEXTE FEW ZENTENCENGERSTRUMPFEN....
Her films, including In the Absence and the Presence, (AKA – ALL OVER THE SHOP), Iowa Blizzard,(A CRITICAL SUCCES D’ESTIME) and Two Girls Downtown Iowa, 1973,(. “…BEG, BORROW, STEAL A TICKET FOR THIS ONE…” ROLLING STONE )deconstruct dance and re-present it as often formalist, abstract imagery that suggests, but does not demonstrate, dance. Summers’s use of movement in those seminal films was often excruciatingly slow and asked the viewer to forego expectations of more traditional elements of “choreography” in favor of a gestalt
(ICH WARNE DICH!!…….)
of cinematic motion. The resonance of her approach is evident in many subsequent dance films, and even more so in the very idea of intermedia or multi-media dance activity through the present. Yvonne Rainer is often cited as a seminal
(MORE OF THIS SEMEN, GET A GRIP YOU CONCEPTUALIST ONANISTS YOU…ON 2ND THOUGHTS, PERHAPS DON’T GRIP SO TIGHT……)
figure in screendance, which she clearly is.
(CLEARLY? I THOUGHT SHE ABSOLUTELY MAINTAINED THE NO TO PERSONALITY, NO TO...OH HANG ON, THE SHOOTING IN THE FOOT THING FOLLOWS...))
However, it is in her famous manifesto that she articulates a position regarding a theory of dance that is overlooked for its significance to the screendance debate. In Yvonne Rainer’s NO Manifesto of 1965, the choreographer/filmmaker states:
No to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make believe no to glamour and transcendency of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved.
(….ER….WHICH BIT ARE WE ACTUALLY ALLOWED TO DO……?)
Amy Greenfield reifies
(HMM, I HAVE A WEE PROBLEM IN "REIFYING" THAT WHICH IS MILITANTLY AND SO PALPABLY ANTI OBJECTIFICATION. CAN WE DISCUSS THIS AS A SEPARATE PHD STRAND?)
Yvonne Ranier’s manifesto in films such as Encounter (l970), For God While Sleeping (l970), Transport [1971], Dirt (l97l), and Element (l973). For Greenfield, technical dancing is irrelevant,
(OF COURSE IT IS, PARTICULARLY IF YOU CAN’T DO IT)
rather, the mise-en-scène of bodies in real, physical – as well as traumatic and repetitive – motion lies at the core of her cinematic exploration. In Transport, for instance, we see a group of people, not performers or dancers, but individuals who can only be immediately identified as humans engaged in a very visceral set of tasks, undertaken with deeply-felt conviction. In other words, there is no artifice and little evidence of the camera’s alteration of reality
(CRUSHING DULLNESS IS THE ONLY GUARANTOR OF A DIRECT AND APT DEPICTION OF REALITY. BUT WAIT...WHAT DO WE MAKE OF DOGME?)
as we see the group carrying a member aloft over rugged terrain, until exhaustion sets in and then another member is lifted above their heads and the process repeats.
( AT LAST! THE PERFECT INSOMNIA CURE!)
As in Ranier’s manifesto, there is no cinematic magic in these early films, no glamour and certainly no transformation. It is what it is and nothing else.
(INTRINSICALLY ANTI-ART, ANTI-EXPERTISE, ANTI INTERESTING)
Neither the movers nor the film are virtuosic.
(THAT IS PATENTLY APPARENT TO EVEN THE LEAST EXPERT OF VOYEUR)
The film is, rather, a moment in time, (WHEN IS IT NOT?) an intervention of camera and recording device into a mindful but seemingly meaningless version of what Allan Kaprow might call “child’s play.”
(MISSED IT! THE ONE TIME A GERMANISM SUCH AS KINDERSPIEL MIGHT EVEN HAVE BEEN HALFWAY APPROPRIATE...)
This work breaks down expectations of both performance and the art of filmmaking.
(IF ALL ELSE FAILS, BREAKDOWN EXPECTATIONS AND WHATEVER YOU DO, LOWER STANDARDS)
In Greenfield’s early work, nothing and everything happens simultaneously.
(NOW THAT QUITE A TRICK, ONLY ACHIEVED SO FAR BY THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT, THE EX- UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS….REMEMBER THOSE GUYS….? AND IT WOULD SEEM MS GREENFIELD)
Her work is a connective thread from dance to what would later become known
(BY WHOM EXACTLY)
as performance art;
( I REPEAT, BY WHOM?)
it also connects to conceptual and minimal art
(ONE MUST DEFY ANY PUNDIT NO MATTER HOW ELOQUENT OR VERBOSE THE RIGHT TO DEFINE ANYTHING AS NEBULOUS, FREE-RANGE OR INHERENTLY ELASTIC IN DEFINITION AS CONCEPTUAL ART. ALL ART IS CONCEPTUAL BY DEFINITION.NO CONCEPT, NO ART, NO DEFINITION) Greenfield’s films are a flashpoint for hybridity
(WHOA THERE TIGER – FLASHPOINT – HYBRIDITY….?)
within the context of an evolving esthetic of screendance in a time of great change in the art world in general
(WHEN EXACTLY WAS THE ART WORLD NOT IN A TIME OF GREAT CHANGE, OR DO WE MEAN MERELY THE LATEST PAROXYSM OF ISM..ER..ISMS….ER……..) .
They are not dance, nor can one argue successfully that they are not not dance.
(SO NOT DANCE AND NOW NOT NOT DANCE ALREADY? PERHAPS THEY ARE NOT NOT STOP GO STOP NOT DANCE – THERE NOW - THAT SHOULD DO THE TRICK….)
They are exhortations to reconsider the nature of dance, community, and cinema. (EXHORTING WHOM EXACTLY EXCEPT FOR A TINY COTERIE OF SIMILARLY MINDED N.E.A. FUNDED LEGENDS IN A GREENWICH VILLAGE SUNDAY LUNCHTIME)
In 1983, Amy Greenfield and Elaine Summers curated and produced the important Filmdance Festival
( IMPORTANTLY PRODUCED ACRES OF MATERIAL FOR THE DENIZENS OF IVY-CLAD BOON-DOCK UNIVERSITIES TO PONTIFICATE WINDILY WITH THEIR DIGI-DANCE GURUS FOR YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS – HELL WE EVEN FUND A UNIVERSITY TENURE CHAIR IN THIS IMPORTANT FESTIVAL ALONE – IT’S THE CULTURE SEE?)
which took place over two weeks at the Public Theater in New York, with more than one hundred films and filmed sequences scheduled in twenty-one different programs. .
(I SMELL AT LEAST THREE PHD’S FOCUSED EXCLUSIVELY ON THIS LITTLE GET-TOGETHER ALONE) They also produced a slim black catalog,
(CERTAINLY A TAD SLIMMER THAN THE MASSIVE EGOS WHICH MUST HAVE PONTIFICATED ENDLESSLY INTO THE NIGHTS TO PRODUCE IT….) which contains essays by both filmmakers and choreographers and is a highly prized document among students and scholars of the genre (OH THOSE PESKY STUDENTS AND SCHOLARS, SO MOVING, SO SHAKING - NEVER IN THE HISTORY OF THE PHD IN PHOTOCOPYING TECHNIQUES - HAS SO MUCH OF SO LITTLE CONSEQUENCE, BEEN REHASHED AND REHEATED, BY SO MANY…)
Both Summers and Greenfield as well as James Byrne who curated the 1989 series at Dance Theater Workshop were artists first, though artists that were interdisciplinary and often worked outside of the discipline of dance. Byrne’s notes for “Eyes Wide Open” at DTW state,
“Featured in this program are dance films and videos that demonstrate bracingly innovative approached to constructing cinematic choreography (AS DISTINCT FROM CHOREOGRAPHIC CINEMATOGRAPHY AND OF COURSE THE VERY LATEST IN GRAPHICHALISED CINEMINIMILISTOGRPAHY) from disparate and minimal movement sources. (SAY WHAT BOY?) All of these works strive to create new forms and structures for the presentation of a screen reality dealing with the human figure and movement. None of the films deal with a traditional approach to filming dance…(OH HEY, EVERYONE, LETS MAKE A DANCE FILM BUT NOT USE A CAMERA!!OR ER DANCERS, OR ANY IDEAS – YEAH, COOOOOLLLL!) This fascinating selection of new works presents a range of possibilities that push and expand the edges of dance video.”
(FORTUNATELY THOUGH, TAKING UP VERY LITTLE ROOM IN THE MIDDLE, SUCH A BADLY OVERLOOKED AREA WHEN THE PUSHING AND ENVELOPES AND ER, EXPANDING GETS SERIOUSLY UNDERWAY AND THE GARDE BEGINS TO GET REALLY DOWN AND ER … AVANT)
This curator’s statement puts his agenda out front of the work and creates a context for viewing. It makes evident that the selection of work both troubles and questions the nature of the form.(THERE’S TROUBLE…RIGHT HERE IN THE NATURE OF THE FORM…) It also operates as a kind of challenge to both makers and curators to answer by way of further exhibitions. (ONE ANSWERS QUESTIONS. ONE FACES CHALLENGES, …I THINK…)
In the catalog for Filmdance 1890’s-1983 Amy Greenfield notes:
“This catalog sets out to discuss the nature of filmdance. Each writer in the catalog was free to choose his or her own subject. No writer knew the specific viewpoints of the others. Therefore, the articles present varying, sometimes opposing, definitions, theories, and discussions on the nature of Filmdance…( CONTROVERSY IS THE SINGLE WORD WHICH SHOULD MORE OR LESS COVER THE ABOVE WAFFLE). The artists who responded to the invitation to write have made statements either on their own films or on their theories of filmdance. In setting down their thoughts, they further help to articulate the varying and changing nature of filmdance. (CHANGING AND VARYING IN THE INTENSITY OF THE OBSCURITY AND INACCESSIBILITY OR MERELY IN THE LEVEL OF THE MILITANT PATRONISING OF AN INCREASINGLY BEFUDDLED AUDIENCE BASE?)
James Byrne and Amy Greenfield each make their case for curatorial prerogative, but both point to the larger needs and desires of the field in general in their statements. The curator’s statements articulate a methodology for how the work might circulate conceptually, as a whole made up of individual voices. Likewise, the festival model creates a context for viewing and also sets parameters for discourse. However, the festival model, often lacking a thesis and leaning more toward an entertainment model is less clear in regard to a desired outcome. So, the gap between those two approaches has led me to a series of rhetorical questions around which this conference is built:
• What responsibilities do programmers and directors of screendance festivals have in regard to defining the field?(FIND SOME FILMS WORTH FORCING PEOPLE OUT OF THEIR HOMES TO COME AND SEE)
• Can curating function as a kind of critical thinking?(IS THERE ANY OTHER KIND OF THINKING IN RELATION TO CURATORIAL PRACTICE?)
• What part might curators play in creating intelligent and thoughtful programming that articulates a distinct point of view that sets one festival apart from another?
(THEY HAD BETTER START AND SOON. AT THE MOMENT THERE IS VERY LITTLE TO DISTINGUISH ANY ONE OF THESE DESPERATE EXERCISES IN WASTING ARTS SUBSIDY FROM ANY OTHER AND FRANKLY A PERILOUSLY DIMINISHING DEMOGRAPHIC ACTUALLY CARE.)
• What does it mean to curate a program of dances for the screen?
(OH BOY! NOW HERE'S A SERIOUS STROKEY BEARDY MOMENT.)
• What historical precedents are there to be found in fine art or experimental cinema models? (WELL LET’S DO THE FINE ART ONE FIRST – RECKON GAINSBOROUGH WAS A MAJOR INFLUENCE ON CONCEPTO-POST MODERN UN-CHOREOGRAPHIC PLASMA OUTCOME SCREEN WORK, BUT HE TRIED TO PLAY DOWN THIS INFLUENCE IN FAVOUR OF HIS POSH-PEOPLES’ PORTRAIT WORK, AND OF COURSE THERE ARE THE FAMOUS DA VINCI STORYBOARDS FOR DEAD DREAMS OF MONOCHROME MEN HOWEVER LLOYD NEWSON FOUND THEM A LITTLE TRITE AND UNDERPOWERED FOR HIS VISION OF THE PIECE.)
• How might curating function as historical documentation? (NOTE TO SELF, WHEN CURATING, KEEP A DIARY – HISTORY OF WHAT, PRAY?)
• Curating as writing: does an articulately curated program function as a text for understanding the form? (NAH! JUST SHOW THE MOVIES, ITS NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION. CREATIVE WRITING CLASS NEXT DOOR LOVE, AND ASK THEM TO KEEP IT DOWN IN THERE, WE ARE TRYING TO SHOW SOME FILMS IN HERE!)
• How might curating shape a dialog about entertainment and the relationship of media to dance?(DIALOGUE KIND OF PRESUPPOSES THE EXISTENCE OF INTERLOCUTORS. UM…..ER…AM I THE FIRST HERE?....SHOULD I GO AND HAVE A COFFEE DOWNSTAIRS UNTIL THE OTHERS GET HERE…..?...ER HELLO …)
• What might curated programs allow for that programs chosen by other means might not? (WELL IT’S A LOT LESS MESSY THAN GETTING YOUR MATES ROUND TO READ CHICKEN ENTRAILS, IF THAT’S WHAT YOU MEAN.)
• Can curating define a model for criticality? (THINK I NEED A BREATHER AT THIS POINT WHICH MIGHT BE A GOOD MOMENT TO QUESTION THE ACTUAL WORD “CRITICALITY”.
UNLESS I AM MUCH MISTAKEN CRITICALITY DESCRIBES THE BEHAVIOURS OF SUB-ATOMIC PARTICLES WHEN IN THE PRESENCE OF FISSILE MATERIAL – DANCEFILM, MOVING IMAGE, CONCEPTUALISM, PARTICLE PHYSICS?...... OOOOHHHH! I SEE THE CONNECTIONS NOW. MORE IMPORTANTLY, I BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND WHY SO MANY DANCEFILM AUDIENCES BEGIN TO LOOK AND FEEL AS ALIENATED AS THE JEWS OF LINZ DURING THE EARLY HOURS OF KRISTALLNACHT IN MANY OF THE AUDITORIA I SHARE WITH THEM.)
• What kind of topics might be suggested as curated programs and what might those topical programs address? (DEAR DOCTOR OF MEEJUH STUDIES AND THAT AND EVERYTHING AND EVERYTHING. YOU ARE SO CLEVER AND ME LITTLE CURATOR HAVE NO IDEA WHAT'S WRONG WITH MY CREATIVE CHOICES. CAN YOU HELP ME DOCTOR…PLEASE?)
• How might curating help to enunciate genres in the field?(CAREFULLY NOW CHILDREN, ROUND MOUTHS AND E..N..U..N..C..I..A..T..E.. G.E.N.R.E.S…YES THAT’S GOOD, AGAIN…. GENRES, NOW LETS GO INDOORS AND TRY THIS AGAIN…..)
With curating or any sort of selection process in which some are chosen, others not, comes the question of elitism.
In other words, who gets to choose and why?
(I DO!!!! I, THE CURATOR!!! NO QUESTION. I AM THAT ELITE OF ONE. WHY? BECAUSE I GET MYSELF UP EARLY AND GO TO BED VERY LATE EVERY DAY, AND IN BETWEEN, PLOUGH THROUGH HOURS AND HOURS OF EARNEST, WELL MEANT, IF UNUTTERABLE DULLNESS, JUST TO WINKLE OUT THE OCCASIONAL FIVE MINUTES OF WELL MADE FILM IN ANY G.E.N.R.E.)
Curating is not however, simply about choosing. (BLIND, AHHHH I’M BLINDED BY THE LIGHT GIVEN OFF BY THIS PARTICULAR INSIGHT, AAHHH – YOU BET IT AINT!
MAYBE WE SHOULD MENTION IN THE PROCESS THE VENUE HIRE, THE LICENSES, THE RECALCITRANT AND GREEDY DISTRIBUTORS, THE MARKETING, THE TICKET OFFICE, THE LATE DELIVERY OF FLYERS AND THIRTY FIVE TYPOS IN THE THE BROCHURE PROOFS, ALL THE WHILE WATCHING EVERY POST FOR THE CHEQUE FROM YOUR MAIN SPONSOR WHO IS BUSILY GOING BUST JUST BEFORE THEY DESPATCH THE CASH…ETC, ETC, ETC....?)
It is a pro-active practice which by its very nature contains in equal parts, academic/pedantic/scholarly and teaching components.( WHATEVER IT IS IS IS NOT THE PEDANTIC BLAH OF PEDAGOGOPUNDITS, DREAMING OF INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL, AND THE UNDIVIDED ATTENTION OF TINY, SLEEPY AUDIENCES OF THE TERMINALLY UNDISTINGUISHED TUCKED AWAY IN DUTCH ARTS CENTRES.
YEEEEEHAAAAH, EUROPE AT LAST!!!!.AND ON AN N.E.A. GRANT NO LESS!!!)
There is in fact a high degree of responsibility that one undertakes as a curator,(YOU DON'T SAY!!) not only to the work, but also to the culture of the art form in general, its historical provenance, its way forward and its venous flow of inter-related tributaries often located outside of its own discipline.
(HIGH RESPONSIBILITY……. VENOUS……..TRIBUTARY…….. OUTSIDE OF ITS OWN DISCIPLINE.
IS THIS A BADLY BUILT SOVIET ERA DAM PROJECT OR A FEW DVD’S MADE BY SOME CONTEMPORARY DANCE STUDENTS WITH ILL-DEFINED AND UNUSUALLY MALEVOLENT DYSFUNCTIONAL ATTITUDES TO THEIR FATHERS WE HAVE HERE? FROM WHICH A BENIGHTED CURATORIAL SOUL IS ATTEMPTING TO WREST SOME SEMBLANCE OF A PATTERN, THEME OR PROGRAMMATIC INTEGRITY ONTO WHICH THEY MIGHT HANG THEIR WELL-INTENTIONED AND DESPERATELY UNDERSUPPORTED EVENT?
(ONE COULD GO ON, BUT ...........WHY?)
etc,etc,etc,etc,etc,etc
To represent fully this windy and occasionally tautological tract in a full version of the Rosenberg paper go here:
http://www.videodance.org.uk/pages/curating_the_practice_edited.doc
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